ABSTRACT
Recent studies on phonological acquisition have largely discarded Jakobson’s hypothesis on the discontinuity of prespeech babbling and early word production (see Jakobson, 1941, p. 20) and have given support to the phonetic continuity of these two utterance forms. It is still controversial, however, to what extent early infant sound production is governed by universal principles or reflects language- specific influences. In recent years research on early phonological acquisition has focused on language-specific characteristics of babbling. Crosslinguistic studies have shown that young children have preferences for sounds and sound structures, which can be correlated with certain characteristics of the respective target languages. For instance, at the babbling stage Japanese children produce more back vowels than English, French, Chinese, or Arabic children (de Boysson-Bardies, Hallé, Sagart, & Durand, 1989), Swedish and English children produce more stops than French or Japanese children (de Boysson-Bardies & Vihman, 1991), and English children produce more closed syllables than French children (Levitt & Utman, 1992).
